Fic: Why Fanfiction Is Taking Over the World

by Jamison, Anne

  I would speculate that a great deal of the stigma surrounding Twilight and its fans—among other fans, even among other fan writers—has to do with internalized gender and genre prejudice. Fanfiction fandoms tend to be genre-based. Romance is a genre, but it’s not a geek genre like science fiction or fantasy, and not a cool genre like mystery or crime drama or horror. The enthusiasm indicated by the preponderance of romance plots and tropes in the fanfiction inspired by these genres doesn’t transfer to romance as such. Romance is a girl genre. It’s not girls doing cool things boys typically do, or girls doing girl things in boy territory. It’s just girls doing girl things in the way girls do. Pathetic much?

  I didn’t think so. I was completely fascinated by the Twilight fanfiction fandom. It took so many of my loves—outrageousness, mashups, women writers, coterie literature, discredited cultural forms—and smooshed them together, serving them over virtual cocktails and flashing GIFs. It was a massive global exchange of porn and recipes and writing advice, all for the fun of it, all for free. These women didn’t just write fic; they built an industry—a cashless one, sure, but a sophisticated, large-scale global economy of review and interview websites, promotional and marketing campaigns, credits and rewards, labor exchanges, vast charity drives—by and for women, though open to whatever men wanted to come along.

  The downside is, they often hated themselves for doing it. They built this vibrant community industry, and then they tore it—and each other—down. It’s the worst and best of women’s culture, all the stuff that makes me proud and all the stuff that makes me want to tear my hair out and weep—often in reaction to the same person, within the space of several lines or tweets or seconds.

  The story of the Twilight fandom is a story of mostly nonradical women who came together in a radical and original, creative, self-sustaining global community. In a stunning bit of irony, their collective power as I witnessed it was fueled in part by their own belief that they were a community of derivative, amateurish hacks who could lay legitimate claim to nothing. Twilight fans were inspired by a book that they maybe loved, but that many also saw as being derivative and amateurish itself. If their original source wasn’t original, for God’s sakes, they weren’t—which spared them from having to worry about it. They simply could write what they wanted and see how far they could go.

  For some of these women, had they not believed they were “only writing fanfic,” they would never have started writing in the first place. “It’s just fic” meant they didn’t need the confidence to innovate and create because they didn’t think of themselves as doing that. They thought of themselves as being silly and having fun, or working through their issues, or giving back to a community. Of course, they were doing all those things, but they were also being creative and innovative. In some cases, it just took them a while to realize it, and the realization came as a happy surprise. In some cases, they still don’t see it that way, and are even offended at the idea. Whatever realizations did or did not come later, the idea of writing “just fanfic” gave a kind of permission. “Just fanfic” made it possible to write for an audience without having to identify as a writer—which can also attract criticisms of arrogance and presumptuousness.

  It worked this way for some, but obviously not for everyone. Some Twilight writers had been writing for years, professionally. Some were CFOs and neuroscientists, some were MFAs, some were queer. Some were housewives. Some were queer housewives. Some were even men. I’ve rarely met more assertive, outspoken women than I have in the Twilight fandom, and some of them (though only some) found their voice there. Some of the writers represented in this volume tell a version of that story. Over the course of years of conversation, I’ve spoken to many fan writers who have described coming to creativity in this back-door way, because they didn’t think they were doing it. But individual writers’ journeys were only a part of what they did without exactly meaning to.

  The Twilight fandom accidentally made an empire. The fandom’s most popular fics—works like “The Office,” “Master of the Universe,” “Wide Awake,” “Emancipation Proclamation,” “Art after Five,” “The Submissive,” “The University of Edward Masen,” and a number of others—had readership that dwarfed most New York Times bestsellers. People outside the community began to see this readership and wanted in. It’s hard to get original fiction read, even for published writers. And the Twilight community offered more than eyeballs—it offered thousands of reviews, and publicity, and awards. In time, the Twilight fanfiction community grew to be less about the Twilight books and movies and more about the fanfiction, which in turn also became less about the books and movies and more about, well, romance writing in a mix of subgenres.

  Aspiring writers began repurposing their original work as Twilight fanfiction, changing the names to Edward, Bella, Rosalie, Jacob. Writers with little if any connection to Twilight began writing stories about its characters because they could get attention and feedback and so many readers if they played along. Some did this but entered into the spirit of the community, giving interviews and recommendations and reviews, revising Twilight tropes and structures along with everyone else—even if Twilight itself never was their favorite, and the community was what had drawn them in. Others were more cynical, standoffish. However they behaved toward the community, the presence of fan writers who were not actually fans made for a different atmosphere than what we normally find in fan communities: fan reverence for the source was missing.

  The Twilight saga stopped functioning as source per se and began functioning as one massive erotic romance prompt. A template. It provided a basic structure, some basic characterizations, and relationship and plot trajectories, but increasingly these elements appeared vampire- and glitter-free. Often in All Human fic, Twilight’s characterizations would be reversed, inverted. Switched up, mixed and matched. Sometimes only the vaguest parallels were retained. One character tended to have more power, be more controlling; one tended to be clumsy. They tended to live in the Pacific Northwest or Chicago (where canon Edward was from). Popular fics spawned genres practically overnight, like tby789’s “The Office.” Others involved high school or BDSM. Genres were often designated by a version of Edward’s name: Tattward (more than one tattoo artist fic); Artward (lots of artists); Domward (Fifty Shades was hardly the first); Subward (there were a few); Geekward; Drugward; Doucheward; Dadward (DILFward); Jockward. And on. And on. There were hundreds of thousands of stories about Edward and Bella doing practically everything except being teen vampires.

  Twilight had been eclipsed. There was fic for fic. Readers and writers alike began to forget where canon stopped, where fanon began. Twific had taken over its own world.

  I started reading compulsively. What did these people think they were doing? So many stories, the same but different. Variations on a theme, permutations, inverted, reversed, restructured. A fugue of a novel, spun out in different directions. I tried to sustain them in my mind simultaneously, thousands of what-ifs—it was like a new structure of fiction.

  My interest in Twilight started with a fanfiction writer called The Black Arrow. She’d read my fic! Which was about a very outdated source, and was not in a fandom, so every early reader was very exciting. (Plus I’d just finished the index of my first book. EVERYTHING that was not my index was exciting.) In any case, my gentle reader mentioned that she’d written a fic for Twilight. I diplomatically said I hadn’t read the books. I’d glanced at them, but . . . again. Not my cuppa. Then The Black Arrow said with her fic, it didn’t really matter if you’d read the books or seen the movies.

  I didn’t believe her. Almost all of the fic I’d read to that point seemed to rely quite heavily on something from its original—even if it was just my interest. The Black Arrow liked something I’d written, though. She’d been supportive. I wanted to return the favor. I only ever said constructive things about fan writers, praising what I saw that I liked and leaving out what I didn’t. I was sure I’d be able to find something to pr
aise, but I didn’t expect to enjoy the story, or even really to be able to follow it.

  First impressions were not auspicious. “The Blessing and the Curse” didn’t sound like my kind of thing. The prologue (a convention I’m not fond of) talked about soul mates, and I was even more skeptical. But there was something that piqued my interest—this soul mate thing, she made it sound coercive, controlling.

  I had no idea.

  As the story progressed, I noticed the writing was good and getting better. Not just “good for fanfiction,” very good. Sexy and heated, but also creepy. The writer had created an entire world out of a house and a neighbor—a world that was very clearly layered over Wuthering Heights, which also provided the epigraph. It wasn’t just that, though. The character Edward was possessive, controlling (Heathcliffian), but he could read Bella’s mind. She’d broken free, moved away, but a family illness forced her back. The created space was claustrophobic and strange and I read it all night, fascinated and a little repelled, really the same way I’d been by the Brontës. Yes, there were sex scenes, eventually, and they were very well done—often such scenes seemed formulaic to me even in professionally published commercial fiction. I was deeply immersed despite not being a contemporary romance reader, not being a fan of paranormal fiction, and never having read the story’s source. When I went back and read Twilight, I saw the connections, but I didn’t need them to read the story. I’m sure the same holds true for its Wuthering Heights connection.

  If Twilight inspired some amateur writer to do this, I thought, I’d probably misjudged it. I made an agreement with my students. We’d take a long weekend. They’d read Flaubert, and I’d read the Twilight series. So I read it—and I didn’t think it was nearly as well written as The Black Arrow’s fic. There was clearly something there, though: I didn’t care about the characters, didn’t like them, didn’t think much of the plot or the style, and yet I read most of the series in a long weekend (I couldn’t get through the final volume).

  The primary result of my reading, though, was that I was now very impressed by the twists and turns The Black Arrow had taken with Twilight’s plot and characters. The biggest was the simplest: Twilight Edward could read everyone’s mind except Bella’s, while “Curseward” could read only Bella’s. More coercive, sure—but also a huge narrative challenge. If he could know everything, how could the tension be maintained? How could he have anything but total power?

  I was impressed, as I said, but also curious. I started reading around in The Black Arrow’s favorites on FanFiction.Net, and then in the favorites of her favorites. I found parody, and porn, and the point of view of a long-suffering Volvo. A story in which Emmett is trying to turn peaches into vampires (I loved this one). Edward crossed with Angel to make an OCD detective-vampire. His fastidious suit closet and secretive habits lead Bella to an erroneous conclusion: he asks Bella to (per Twilight) “Say it. Out loud.” So she does: “Edward, you’re gay.”

  Then there was “Wide Awake”—a phenomenon in and of itself. Long the biggest fic in fandom—as featured on MSNBC. On Mommy boards. Mentioned at my daughter’s soccer games by people with no awareness of my interest in such things. The story that inspired thousands of women—including E. L. James, by her own account—to try their hand at writing. Its author, AngstGoddess, still refuses to earn a penny from it, but even back then, Snowqueens Icedragon (E. L. James) paid over $100 in data fees to download it to her phone (a reminder that someone’s long been making a buck from fic, just not the people writing it). “Wide Awake” had its own fan communities—and it had its own hate communities. I wish it had its own recipe book; Bella communicated her emotions by baking. Mmmm. Cookies.

  Like “The Blessing and the Curse” by The Black Arrow, “Wide Awake” took a detail from Twilight and tweaked it: in Twilight, vampire Edward doesn’t sleep. In “Wide Awake,” both characters are terrified to sleep and bond by helping to keep each other awake to stave off debilitating nightmares. They both suffered childhood traumas—it became a favorite game of the Twilight fandom to imagine the kinds of psychological traumas or mental disorders that would make the canon characters’ behaviors make sense in the real world.

  They did this a lot. Fansites obligingly provided guides just to keep them all straight: Darkward, Highward, Curseward, Drunkward, Hockeyward, Toonward, Mobward. Many of these popular ’wards went on to refer not to a single fic but an entire genre. And there are more. Some even got their own non-’ward names—which in two cases became the names of bestselling books: Beautiful Bastard (BB) and Fifty.

  Of course, there were also fics that exploded the fast evolving genres and conventions of the fandom, either by taking them on or by violating every convention in sight. Enter BellaFlan’s “Becoming Bella Swan” and algonquinrt/d0tpark3r’s “Mr. Horrible” (we hear from both authors later in this section). Enter “Gynazole”: Edward is a loud-talking pharmacist at a Target. Bella is a woman with an embarrassing vaginal condition. “Gynazole’s” characters had Twitter accounts—Bella’s handle named a hot-sexy vampire-esque alter ego; Edward’s ID was an earnest series of numbers. These accounts were real and actually tweeted; these tweets figured into the story and also announced spoilers and updates. The fic’s author showed up as her character’s neighbor and started stealing cats from other fics and holding them for ransom.

  As a literature professor, I found both this body of work and way of reading truly astonishing. Because yes, these ’wards and Bellas were distinctive characters, but they were all riffing on a common source. Even if the source had not been their initial inspiration, being published on fansites with canon names meant they came asking to be related to Twilight and also to other fanfictions. They asked readers to compare and notice where they came together with and departed from canon—and they departed a lot. Still, their stories were commentary on one another. They were conversations. And, more often than not, they were conversations the writers didn’t have the opportunity to have in their day-to-day lives—about sex, or rape, or BDSM, or what friendship means. About cookies.

  I read fics that commented on and started conversations about middle school and fandoms (a romance between a Harry Potter fan and a Lord of the Rings fan—conflict!). About religion (featuring an invented, Amish-like religious community—where attractive adult virgins were the norm). About class politics. About Washington politics. Elementary school politics. After a lot of research and reading, I still didn’t know quite what to make of it—but I had to teach it. I did. And my classes decided that Twific was, collectively, kind of brilliant.

  It was also huge, global, and, as my students and I realized during the summer of 2010, kind of doomed. If Twific had been a bank, it would have been “too big to (commercially) fail,” but its implicit contracts were all based on an assumption of noncommercial, nonoriginal collective enterprise. This assumption meant (or so participants believed) that no one individual could take advantage of all the many hours of donated labor everyone was putting in. And so people gave freely—often at the expense of their family life or work life or own profitable enterprises—many hours, to promote and share and illustrate and edit and host other people’s stories.

  But this implied contract didn’t exist anywhere, and as it turned out, its assumptions weren’t universally shared.

  Even when I was teaching it in 2010, this cashless empire had begun to become . . . less cashless. The popular fanfiction hosting site Twilighted launched the publishing house Omnific, which “specialized in transformative works,” changing the character names on popular All Human fanfics such as “Boycotts and Barflies” to publish novels such as . . . Boycotts and Barflies. Omnific went on to publish a popular fanfic from my syllabus, the Dante/Twilight crossover “University of Edward Masen.” The Writer’s Coffee Shop (TWCS), which published the “original” name-changed Fifty Shades of Grey, grew out of another popular Twilight fanfiction hosting archive of the same name. These endeavors and other instances of wank (which is how authors’ atte
mpts to take themselves or their work seriously are often categorized) made writers targets of tremendous collective vitriol. After my class was over, a hate website called Twankhard, Twilight’s very own, much nastier “fandom wank” site dedicated to bringing down writers who gave themselves airs, was launched—anonymously. It reported on anything its likewise anonymous posters found to be in any way self-aggrandizing, or even other-aggrandizing. It was all just fic, and people should know their place and stay in it. In some ways, Twankhard was a case of a lioness’s rage at the creature that threatened its young. But the threatening creature was also . . . its young.

  Even this site was really nothing compared to the kind of mutual shaming and hatred that went on around the publishing question—which is complicated enough to deserve (and here gets) its own section. It was not—and is not—always like that, however. The Twilight fandom also encompassed many women working together and finding much to love and support in each other and in themselves.

  My students’ perspective on fandom, romance, and Twilight fans, and even on women writers, really changed as a result of reading and listening to some of the writers here. Making equal use of prominent Marxist critic Theodor Adorno and Fic contributor Kristina Busse, my student Myles Barker theorized that in a mass culture where three-quarters of media jobs go to men, fanfiction introduced a space in which women could assert control and undermine the dominant culture. Barker saw the women of the Twilight fandom as displacing the roles of the publisher, distributor, and author, devising their own systems, and thus giving the lie to Adorno’s theory that mass culture leaves no room for imagination or reflection on the part of the audience. Everyone in the class had a theory—that was the requirement. Dai Newman saw fanfiction as a kind of collection: “actively, selectively, and passionately acquiring . . . things removed from ordinary use,” ordinary use here being commercial use but also the way that characters usually interact with trappings of fiction such as plot, pacing, and development, which Newman found less important in fanfiction. Importantly, he relied on Susan Stewart’s sense of the collection as unity, not sequential but as synchronous whole—a theory he believed equally applies to Twilight fanfiction taken as a body of work. Cooper Savage saw Twific as the punk rock of fiction; Pace Measom—via Slavoj Zizek and Philip K. Dick—saw fanfiction as “the replicants of the literary world.” (All theoretical and fanfic pairings are my students’ own, and the complete work can be found on the course website.92)